One of my aims as Artist in Residence is to visit every reserve looked after by the Trust, and write a geo-located haibun for each location. A haibun is a Japanese form or writing that combines descriptive prose with small haiku poems at key points, often at the end like and anchor, but sometimes throughout the piece like glades of sunlight in a wood.
These two haibun were written at Lazenby Woods, and you can put the titles into the What Three Words app to get precise map references to where I was walking!
axed.thus.buck
The track is almost a holloway, formed between the high hedges by deep ruts made by a filthy yellow JCB that follows us part of the way with its shovelling cradle held high. I don’t want to start this way, imagining the worst – commercial felling. The men say no, they’re there to open the way to the ancient woods, too steep to be useful. We’d hoped to reach them by an easier path.
Retrace the wrong steps
Take another, different chance
Cold rain blows us on
We must climb high to leave behind the brown noise of Teesside. Yellowish mud drags at our boot soles. Miniature flash-floods ripple over the remains of the metalled track. The high verges are glossy with ivy, and the tight green scrolls of young Lords and Ladies. It’s been an obdurate spring, but we’ve come with faith in bluebells.
Once we’re past the churned sludge at the entrance to the woods where the heavy plants turn off, the peace of undisturbed mulch is quiet and springy underfoot. But only a few smoky spindles of blue are visible between the trees – we are too early. I fold the dank day into me, and the blackened fire-pit by the fallen log. Its ruined halo of plastic bottles and crushed beer cans shall be my crown.
Thrush song in sunlight
Blackbird solo in the rain
Scattered showers
A lace of birdsong is thrown over us. A canopy of finch-twitter and shocking wrens - and a black redstart! I almost miss it flashing up on my birdsong app. But there it is again. A black redstart, and next to its avatar a little red dot of rarity. I hold up my phone like a trophy. When we descend the damp, green aisle of the bank with the digger as our page boy, drizzle as our veil.
moment.second.catch
This time I’m alone. Behind me are the growth rings of Eston, Normanby, Lazenby, Teesville, South Bank; the vast trunk of Teesside, rooted in boom-times. Growth spurts came with the discovery of ironstone in the hills, low hills that look too mild to harbour anything but bluebells. Will I be too late for them flowering, after being too early? The worry nags as I drive through places once mapped under other names. From Spencer Beck eastwards to Crossbeck; from the river foreshore of South Bank to the crest of the Eston Hills. Switch on the geo-grid and watch myself move through its strange poetry, from the parking spot where I sort out my backpack of provisions for the walk [teeth.jacket.name] to the head of the road [muddy.bench.margin] and on into the shady woods [silver.safe.dark].
It’s like a different place now the sun has arrived. Poppies are flamenco dancers. Scent hangs heavy around the blossoming hawthorns. The horse chestnuts have made altars of themselves, hundreds of candles against a Mary-blue sky. Where the digger went, the ruts have deepened and dried. A prospecting queen bumble bee investigates holes in the leather-hard tread marks, and a heat haze wobbles the chimneys of the Wilton petrochemical works. As the road begins to rise, an orange-tip butterfly flirts momentarily with the flip-flapping shred of a hazard tape staked at the verge to mark the route of the Sabic UK* ethylene pipeline, which carries liquid gases hundreds of miles in an invisible subterranean flume unmarked on maps. Ethylene begets polyethylene, begets polystyrene. “Dial Before You Dig” advises their unobtrusive way marker, with a code so you can tell them where exactly you are. The blunt black oar of a magpie’s feather lustres in the long grass - I pick it up and thread it into my messy bun for safety.
where I am
is in the path
of butterflies
The moment I reach the woods I see them, a slow river cascading down the slope, hazy violet-blue. To be surrounded by bluebells is to stand in the past, on undisturbed ground. Listen! An insistence of chiffchaff. The massive ventriloquism of wrens. Sit still and fade away. On the underside of every sycamore leaf, a single long-legged fly rests its springy chassis in the shade, all the way up in a tenement of green.
little by little
seed speck sets a bulb of blue…
thoughts, trickling
When I go, it’s partly to go, and partly to come back. A different me waits dreamily at the junction, radio on, for the stream of traffic to offer up a gap. [wing.helps.song]. Back in normality, back to humanity, picking up groceries, and why is everyone looking at me like that? Woman from the wild woods, drunk on bluebells, a single flight feather still tangled in her hair.
